Some Call Me Angel, by Wesley Thanderin

Some Call Me Angel

an Angela Parsons mystery

by Wesley Thanderin

ONE

A dance I was familiar with, staying far enough away from my "partner" so that he does not suspect he's being tailed. This was a little harder than usual because the fellow liked to walk through crowded places.

If I did not know better, I would think he knew he was being shadowed and was making it hard on me. But I was not the usual private investigator. I could do this in my sleep – and had more than once in all my years of detective work.

It did not help that the mark was not particularly impressive. Longish brown hair, green lip gloss with matching eye shadow, a pair of those long dangling diamond earrings with small interlocking golden hoops, the latest style in demi-sleeved suit jackets… Yeah, you guessed it: just like most other guys on the avenue. If it had not been for the dragon tattoo on his left forearm from elbow to wrist, I would have lost him in the crush of humanity that is the West Hollywood Market.

It was a typical case. Suspicious wife – with a lawyer waiting in the wings – and a wealthy husband: grandson of Microsouth founder, William Billygates, once supposedly the richest man in the world; husband apparently having an early mid-life crisis; a lot of time away from home and business unaccounted for… Yes, all the classic makings of an infidelity case as any I had known, but for the gut feeling I had that there was something seriously amiss here.

Grandfather loved the cases where his inquisitive muse took hold and he had trained me to give in to my own version of that muse when it came to call. The cases under such direction were usually more enjoyable (as well as dangerous) than the run-of-the-mill case. Of course, his cases at Scotland Yard were never as dull as the usual paternity cases I had on my plate these days since I left the force. Unlike the television and print media would have people believe, private detective work rarely involved murders or cases of national security. Not anything near as exciting and usually involving some rather crude camera work, window peeping, and the like. The excitement in such cases was usually confined to the sexual organs of the mark. A voyeur would love the work. For the rest of us, it was merely a living.

Except for the rare case when the muse came to visit, fully awakening all the senses, telling you that you better not doze off or you'll miss something vital in a case that promised to be much more memorable than most. On such cases, careers and reputations were established or lost – as well as lives.

And let's face it, we are like everyone else: we live for the exciting moments, those few times each of us gets to set aside a part of our lives as something truly memorable, truly uplifting… truly worth living.

While jostling elbows in the press of shoppers and pickpockets in the Market, this case seemed unlikely to be one of those orchestrated by the muse but still, the feeling persisted.

The two previous days of following this mark had resulted in nothing more than watching him shop for some new clothes – for himself, not a mistress – and sampling the wares over at the farmer's market in Saugus.

And today, another adventure in a market. What was he looking for today, some bootleg videosticks of the latest Hollywood blockbusters? This guy was obviously still living off his inheritance and had no intention of employment, gainful or otherwise. He was too busy spending money to worry about getting more.

I took up a spot in front of a vendor of gaudy jewelry. Those sort of knock-offs of what the stars wear to gala events. Things they do not actually own but borrow from some designer collection. The salesman was busy with several other customers and would not bother me while I kept an eye on my pigeon, stopping to shop at another booth.

The dance continued for over an hour. Him shopping almost at random though I never saw him actually purchase anything. I, on the other hand, kept purchasing different hats or shawls to vary my disguise in case he should ever look around. Fortunately, he seemed to be completely oblivious of my presence.

At last! He paused to check his watch and then turned and walked. Past the stalls and vendors. This was something different, I thought. He is meeting someone!

I fell back and kept him at the edge of my vision. Fairly soon we were beyond the market and him walking with a purpose. He was not looking for a bargain at the moment. He seemed to be up to some sort of business. Probably shady.

As I had suspected, he soon turned down an alley. If you think trailing someone is difficult, good luck doing it in an alley. It’s a long straight tunnel with nothing there but you and the mark. If you step out in the open too soon, the jig is up.

So I had to stand beyond his field of view and peek around the corner. In retrospect, I probably could of gone ahead and followed him as he never once turned around suspiciously to see if he was being tailed.

About halfway down, he stopped at a door and knocked. No secret knock, just a couple of loud bangs. Wham! Wham! Then waited for the door to open. And whoever opened the door was not suspicious enough to see if the guy had been followed.

Maybe it wasn't anything shady, I thought. Someone should be a little more circumspect if it was. But even that thought wasn't enough to throw caution to the wind and bang on the door myself.

But I did want to know what was going on in there.

It turns out the building was one of those small warehouses you see in the garment district; two floors high but with the main room opening to the skylights and a set of offices ringed around the work area double-decker with a walkway around.

I was able to gain access to the roof from an adjacent building and hoped the meeting – or whatever it was – had not already ended while I located a vantage point. To my relief, they were still in the meeting. From the distance, I could not make out what exactly they were dealing… I didn't see any briefcases exchange hands or anything. But perhaps they were just making arrangements for the exchange.

One might wonder why my mind works this way, always expecting the worst of people. It's a failing, I know, but it's one of the by-products of my line of work. Trust is not high on the list of characteristics of the people I tail as a general rule.

The gentleman my mark was meeting was unfamiliar to me but the muscle he had in his retinue I was familiar with. Sammy the Slizzle. Big and dumb as they come. He was in football in high school and so intimidated his teachers that they all kept passing him for the good of the team – and at six foot eight, three hundred sixty pounds, that was a lot of intimidation.

College was another thing: the professors did not intimidate so easily and he was flunked out. He was hired on by the San Diego team but was canned after training camp because he was not up to learning the playbook, even with the extra tutoring they gave him.

So, as large as he was and with no literate skills, he had become muscle-for-hire. And that, as it turned out, he was very, very good at. And still very intimidating. He didn't even have to do anything, just slizzle on over to someone and they quickly took the hint. It wasn't that the Slizzle was slow… okay, mentally, he was. He could move quicker than most men his size even if he did take longer than the usual joker to catch on to things. But once he figured something out, he had it dead to rights.

So the stranger was someone of some importance. Sammy did not work cheap. Slow as he was, money he understood. After a half hour without a clue to what was going down, the mark left and I shinnied back down to the street to follow him home.

Funny, with all the dough this guy had, his choice of a dwelling puzzled me. It was one of those neo-yuppie colonials built back at the turn of the century. Most of the ones I saw were in the Washington, D.C., area, but they caught on over on the West Coast as well. Looking like a plantation manor house, it was certainly out of place in the palm trees.

I guess you can't figure for some people's taste.

Yeah, and this is a mark I'm talking about. Go figure.